Unexplained! by Clark Jerome

Author:Clark, Jerome
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Visible Ink Press
Published: 2013-11-21T16:00:00+00:00

Gulliver confronts a Yahoo in Jonahan Swift’s classic 1726 novel, Gulliver’s Travels.

A particularly interesting account from a few years later is chronicled in Ernest Favenc’s The History of Australian Exploration From 1788-1888 (1888), related to a tragically failed 1848 transcontinental expedition launched by Ludwig Leichhardt. He and his men vanished in the interior and were never heard from again, their fate unlearned, though subject to both abundant speculation and follow-up searches.

In 1851 two would-be squatters, named Oakden and Hulkes, set out west of Lake Torrens, South Australia, hoping to locate good grazing land. They found lush, lake-filled territory and more of the same to their northwest from aborigines, who also regaled them with accounts of the wildlife that could be found there. They also offered, Favenc noted, “descriptions of strange animals,” including the “jimbra, or apes, of Western Australia, which ruthless animals, according to blackfellows’ legend, devoured the survivors of Leichhardt’s party, as they straggled into the confines of that colony.”

A decade later, members of another expedition passing through the region also heard of the jimbra, said to resemble a monkey but to be so fierce that it would kill a man if it caught one alone. “Thinking there might be a confusion of name,” Favenc wrote, “the explorers asked if the jimbra or jingra was the same as the ginka—the native name for devil. This, however, was not so, as the natives asserted that the devil … was never seen, but the jimbra was both seen and felt.” A few weeks later, speaking with other aborigines in an eastern part of the region, they heard about the dead white men. The native informants assumed they had been from Leichhardt’s group; the victims had died along a large salt lake either from jimbra attack or from thirst. In either case, the account had it, the creatures had eaten their bodies. Favenc remarked, “It must seem strange that the natives should in the jimbra have described an animal (the ape) they could not possibly have ever seen.”

As more British and other Europeans occupied the continent, growing numbers of references to comparable creatures—sometimes retrospective, sometimes current—found their way into print. In one of the former, told in 1903, a respected tribal elder recalled witnessing the killing, by a large band of aborigines, of a Hairy Man west of Yass, in eastern New South Wales, in 1847, when he was ten years old. He said it was black-skinned and covered with gray hair. In the second category, this story appeared in the Maitland Mercury & Hunter River General Advertiser (New South Wales), April 2, 1868:

The following narration we present to our readers for what it is worth, merely promising that our informant gave us the intelligence in all good faith, and appeared to believe most entirely in the truth of his statement. Patrick Hogan, a tree selector [tree farmer] on the other side of the Sugarloaf Mountain, towards Lake Macquarie, was falling trees in the bush at about three o’clock last Thursday afternoon

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